Bitcoin developers are rare, numbering only a few thousands really skilled ones. If you want to find and retain the best Bitcoin software engineers, you’ll want to know some tricks to get them.

The A-Z of Bitcoin Developers

First, Bitcoin developers fall into three fields.

There are those who….

Build applications that interact with your blockchain: These are programmers who know web development and popular libraries like ReactJS. They don’t need specialized blockchain knowledge.

Build on an existing framework (usually in the form of smart contracts): These are smart contract developers, with a background in programming, security and software testing. These developers tend to know IPFS/Filecoin, Oracles, token models, state channels, and the like.

These developers build a blockchain from scratch: They are full-stack developers with a strong background in lower-level programming languages (e.g., Java, OCaml, and C#), distributed systems and cryptography.

So, essentially your search boils down to what you want your Bitcoin developer to do. Once you know that, the rest is easy.

Where to Find your Bitcoin Developers

The “regular” Bitcoin engineer who improves your apps

You’ll want programmers who know web development and popular libraries like ReactJS. They don’t need specialized blockchain or Bitcoin knowledge.

You’ll want Solidity developers, with a background in programming, security and software testing. These developers should be familiar with IPFS/Filecoin, Oracles, token models, state channels, and the like.

You may want to search LinkedIn for programmers that have these skills, scour relevant subReddits or place a cheap Reddit ad on crypto-subs.

The highly uncommon Bitcoin blockchain builder

This is the rarest sort of engineer to find. You’ll want a full-stack developer with a strong background in lower-level programming languages (e.g., Java, OCaml, and C#), distributed systems and cryptography.

Here’s How to Motivate Terrific Bitcoin Developers to Work for You

Qualifications for your Bitcoin software engineer include the following:

A solid understanding of code and programming. You’ll want a backend and frontend developer, who knows codebases like Java, C++, Ethereum Solidity, Python and more. You’ll want them to have experience working with these languages in professional settings. Such Bitcoin developers also need to be able to program high-quality code for Ethereum or Bitcoin blockchains (at least), encode smart contracts and digital tokens, and master game theory and economic principles. They’ll need to have experience in areas like fixed income instruments, currencies, and commodities (FICC), equities, payments processing, and wholesale credit.

Your dream Bitcoin developer frequents bitcoin development communities, chats on hackathons, patronizes online and offline meetings, is an excellent multitasker and handles challenges. More so, Bitcoin engineers, as with all blockchain engineers, must be open to change and willing to learn. “You can’t just say ‘I am a highly specialised blockchain guy’ because that actually doesn’t really mean anything, or say ‘I am really good at Eris’,” explains Seamus Cushley, Director of PwC, blockchain consulting services, continuing to explain that, “Eris may not be here tomorrow: It may become the underpinnings of the globe or they may not. So it is the ability to change which is important.”

Places to Look for the Bitcoin Programmer?

Look for full-time Bitcoin software engineers on online blockchain-related forums like Bitcointalk or relevant Reddit subgroups. You may may also want to consider platforms like Gitter, the preferred chat app for developers, or crypto channels on Slack or Discord. You’ll find blockchain engineers on blockchain meetups and in developer conferences like Ethereum Devcon (i.e., Ethereum Foundation Developers Conference).

Bottom Line

You’ll need to learn the rudiments of Bitcoin technology to find them. And even then you may fail, especially if you’re hiring a Bitcoin software engineer to build a private ledger for a bank – these individuals believe in decentralizing the system! You have to be extremely creative, resourceful, and almost emphatic.

According to former chief information officer at UBS and founder of Bussmann Advisory, Oliver Bussmann, there are only about 20,000 such individuals in existence. William Mougayar, reckoned that there are even less, estimating that there are approximately “5,000 developers dedicated to writing software for cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and blockchain in general.”

Then again: Look hard enough and try hard enough, and you may find at least one or two great Bitcoin developers who may consider giving your company a try.

We here at Blockchain Developers, Inc. are world-class at helping you find and hire the talented Blockchain developers you need to grow. Just fill out our contact form, and we’ll be happy to see if we can help!

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are already highly innovative for businesses, but the real revolution is in the underlying blockchain technology and opportunities for smart contracts. A large part of the appeal for enterprises and organizations of smart contracts is the ability to reliably and securely transact amongst themselves, without needing lawyers, banks, or other intermediaries.

Smart contract developers can help businesses to sell, buy, rent, license, and more, faster, at a lower cost, and even more reliably.

Which Smart Contract Advantage Do You Want First?

Contract breach prevention, property law, financial services, and credit enforcement are all possibilities, and the rest is only limited by the imagination of enterprises and their smart contract coders. With the right blockchain programmer on your team, your company can start making the most of any or all of the following advantages of smart contracts.

First, the smart contract is permanent, as it is recorded on the blockchain. Second, the contract is a program and can automatically manage assets, for example, by making rental items available or locking them down, according to whether rental payments have been made. Third, the smart contract is also tamper-proof and will always function as it has been programmed to function.

Is the Race on for Smart Contract Coders?

The real race, the one for the lowest costs, smoothest operations, and highest customer satisfaction, has always been on. Enterprises aiming for business success see a smart contract developer as a resource to help them achieve those goals. The opportunities to streamline activities and transactions make smart contract engineers sought after by different businesses, which are consequently stepping up their recruitment activities to bring this talent and know-how onboard.

How Much time Do You Have?

The attraction of cost savings and improved transactions is not the only force at work when it comes to hiring blockchain coders for programming smart contracts. If you’re not pulled into the world of smart contracts by your own volition, you may find yourself being pushed into it by your business partners, suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders.

Any persons or entities with a vested interest in the profitability and efficiency of your enterprise can make the link between these parameters and programmable contracts running over a blockchain base. They’ll want to know what you’re doing to harness the power of smart contracts, save money, help them do better business, increase the share price, or other desirable results.

What Does It Take to Have These Developers in Your Company?

The first question you might ask is, “Do we already have this expertise in-house?” Smart contracts are pieces of software, and your enterprise, like many others, may have its own software development resources. Nevertheless, there are two dimensions to a smart contract engineer that must be considered.

The first, and perhaps more obvious one, is technical ability. An understanding of blockchain technology will need to be accompanied by strong software programming skills, possibly in multiple programming languages, and knowledge of networking and cryptography. These requirements alone may lead you to the conclusion that you do not currently have employees with this combination of skills.

Is The Solution Internal?

Your next question may then be, “Can we train them?” After all, there are trainers and training courses for many branches of IT. However, now the second dimension of the smart contract developer comes into play, which is an understanding of business transactions and their legal, economic, and financial aspects. These two dimensions together, technical and business, make a blockchain software engineer of any kind a rare bird, and those who can program smart contracts even rarer. They also make it more difficult to find competent trainers to inculcate this spread of skills and knowledge into your employees.

Is the Solution to Finding Smart Contract Developers External?

Blockchain software engineers for smart contract development also exist in third-party service providers. While the advantage is in being able to access resources that are already operational, with no lead time for training, there may also be significant disadvantages.

Third parties are less likely to understand the specific business needs of your enterprise. Also, if your agreement with the provider ends, the provider keeps the know-how, while your organization is left high and dry. Alternatively, you can hire full-time developers who specialize in blockchain and smart contracts. This may be the best solution of all. You get to have your cake and eat it, too, with ready-to-go expertise that stays in your enterprise afterwards.

The Time to Hire a Smart Contract Developer is Now

Naturally, other enterprises have already come to the same conclusion and have recruitment programs in place for blockchain coders for smart contracts. Note that hiring blockchain programmers often differs from classical hiring approaches. You need to know where to look and how to make career opportunities attractive to people who for the moment at least are seldom short of a tempting job offer. With the right methods, however, your enterprise can acquire this talent and start reaping the benefits of smart contracts almost immediately.

We here at Blockchain Developers, Inc. are world-class at helping you find and hire the talented Blockchain developers you need to grow. Just fill out our contact form, and we’ll be happy to see if we can help!

At its core, Bitcoin was designed to be a form of uncensorable, robust and sound money: a type of peer-to-peer digital cash that operated without the need for any financial intermediary or government control. In the year 2010, Bitcoin facilitated its first trade when an early adopter bought 2 pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoins — a very expensive meal in today’s market. Since then, Bitcoin has experienced exponential growth, reaching a market cap of $70 billion in less than 10 years.

Today the most popular use case of Bitcoin is its form of global currency, but Bitcoin is also a computer protocol that fosters open innovation. This core protocol is maintained by a small number of blockchain developers known as the Bitcoin core developers.

Companies that have adopted and accepted Bitcoin as one of their payment methods have experienced serious competitive advantages in recent years. These advantages include settlement time within hours instead of days, quick and easy international transfers, and negligible transaction fees. Such perks have allowed businesses to achieve faster delivery times for their products, receive more credit from their suppliers, and provide a superior customer experience with a hassle-free payment system. The subset of blockchain developers known as Bitcoin engineers can help companies fulfill today’s market needs and demands.

Bitcoin coders can facilitate the development of platforms and payment systems that can help existing companies differentiate themselves from their competitors. For example, in 2014, Shopify announced its integration of Bitcoin payments with Coinbase for their e-commerce software platform. This led to an enormous value creation for Shopify users as their customer base became global overnight. Bitcoin engineers and Bitcoin coders can help make such integrations successful for e-commerce businesses.

In using the Bitcoin protocol, consumers, as well as merchants, gain a technological advantage. As transactions are irreversible in the Bitcoin network, there is a lower risk to merchants, because losses related to fraudulent transactions can be avoided. Furthermore, as the network relies on using public-private key cryptography instead of personal information (such as name, address, phone number) for facilitating transactions, data breaches due to server hacks and identity theft issues can be eliminated altogether.

Bitcoin is not only a global monetary system but also a protocol that enables open innovation. Blockchain software developers like Bitcoin engineers are hard at work to bring such innovative ideas to reality.

Industry Use Cases

The advent of Ethereum has encouraged a lot of open innovation, but Ethereum still hasn’t passed the test of time, as the technology is still less than 3 years old. On the other hand, the Bitcoin blockchain has stood the test of time, and as of today, represents one of the most robust, secure, and programmable blockchains out there.

Namecoin (https://namecoin.org/) — the first project built on top of the Bitcoin protocol — is building an open, decentralized, and censorship-resistant DNS infrastructure for the internet. Technically, Namecoin is a key/value pair registration system for domain names. The associated values of a stored key (such as registered names) are stored in the blockchain and can be queried and retrieved as required. It currently costs 0.01 NMC (Namecoin internal cryptocurrency) to register a domain.

ColoredCoins (http://coloredcoins.org/) is another project that is working toward building an open-source banking infrastructure for digital money. The project’s vision is to provide a blockchain-agnostic layer to issue various forms of digital currencies. Built on the Bitcoin protocol, the system facilitates the creation and transfer of digital assets with the robust security of the Bitcoin blockchain. One of the key differentiators of the ColoredCoins project is that it doesn’t have its own cryptocurrency, so each transaction within the network is a actually a Bitcoin transaction.

Civic (https://www.civic.com/) is a recent project that raised around $33 million USD and is working to build a secure identity platform using Rootstock (RSK). RSK is another smart contracts platform built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. The Civic protocol consists of validators — institutions such as government entities and utility companies — that can verify the identity of individuals or organizations and push them to the blockchain through a method called attestation. Civic envisions being able to battle identity theft by providing theft insurance and notification alerts when identities on the Civic blockchain are compromised.

As we can see from the aforementioned examples, Bitcoin is not only a form of global currency, but a platform on which to develop similar open, decentralized, and trustless applications. This is a truly powerful thing in its own right, but it is only the beginning. Blockchain developers such as Bitcoin engineers can help your company be part of this new growing industry. Hire a Bitcoin coder today!

We here at Blockchain Developers, Inc. are world-class at helping you find and hire the talented Blockchain developers you need to grow. Just fill out our contact form, and we’ll be happy to see if we can help!

As of late 2017, there were less than 30,000 blockchain developers compared to 18.5 million software engineers worldwide. This tremendous shortage in blockchain engineers in the industry right now makes it harder and harder to find the right talent. As demand for crypto-related ventures grows at an exponential rate, the gap between available talent and market demand keeps increasing. Because blockchain development represents a different paradigm of software development, it takes longer for traditional developers to pick up the new skills. But for companies that are training current developers, as well as the ones who have managed to bring aboard blockchain developers, a serious competitive advantage lies ahead.

Previously, any company would need to go through a long process of evaluating market needs, creating a cost-benefit analysis, and conducting software development lifecycle planning to even test out a product idea. But this could change drastically. An agile development team with Ethereum and smart contracts developers could take on this massive task, using the Ethereum Blockchain to deploy a product, get users (through tokenized incentives), and test out the product-market fit with almost negligible infrastructure and capital costs. Decentralized applications on the blockchain are a great way to create, as well as capture, value.

Products that traditionally needed a big team can now be developed and deployed by a handful of people. Not only that, but the product itself is global from day one, and its platform users can be incentivized through tokens to use the product. This creates a tremendous advantage for products that previously faced the ‘chicken and the egg’ problem of getting a marketplace going through network effects. In other words, creating evangelical customers through token ownership creates a marketplace from day one. Hence, a large number of projects are already reaching market momentum today.

Today, there are millions of apps in the the Apple or Android App store. Similarly, there will be the same amount (or even more) of decentralized apps on the ‘Blockchain App Store’ (app stores being Ethereum or the NEO blockchain) in the future. The opportunity and the timing are right. Creativity is going to be the only limit for blockchain coders in the near future. As the new era of blockchain-based applications emerges, a few of these projects are reaching mass adoption and are entering markets that have been previously controlled by a few centralized institutions. Smart contracts developers, including Ethereum developers and bitcoin developers, could help any company in any industry get ahead amongst its peers.

Current Industry Use Cases

Storj (https://storj.io/) is a decentralized and distributed cloud storage startup that is creeping into the cloud storage market. With Storj, users get the benefits of high security and availability of a decentralized network at a price that is less than the leading competitors in the marketplace. Furthermore, users can earn Storj Coins (which can be converted to dollars) by renting out their extra hard disk space. Hence, Storj provides a much more favorable outcome for users.

Basic Attention Token or BAT (https://basicattentiontoken.org/) is another startup (co-founded by the creator of Javascript and the creator of Mozilla and Firefox) that is taking the advertising industry head on. Centralized giants such as Google and Facebook extract all the benefit from user data and take as much as 73% of the advertising dollars, along with users’ privacy. Advertisers, on the other hand, lack quality information to target their ads and are not fully aware of what they are paying for. With the power of blockchain and decentralization, BAT aims to create a new platform that is shared equally among users, publishers and advertisers. The Brave browser anonymously captures the areas where users spend their time, serving as the perfect tool to calculate and inform publishers on where to target their ads. Publishers receive more revenue by cutting out the middleman, and users receive better targeted ads that suit their needs without losing their privacy.

These are among a few of the projects that a blockchain software engineer could bring to life. A blockchain programmer specializes in decentralized application development, and together with other smart contracts developers, could potentially build projects to put a company in the forefront of its industry. The possibilities are endless – hire blockchain developers today!

We here at Blockchain Developers, Inc. are world-class at helping you find and hire the talented Blockchain developers you need to grow. Just fill out our contact form, and we’ll be happy to see if we can help!

Ask any Bitcoin development company what they wish they had more of, and you’ll likely get the same answer: Smart contract developers. Not just any smart contract developer, mind you, but someone who’s really good, who is timely and responsive, knows the field, and cares about the qualilty of work.

Top smart contract engineers are in short supply. Former chief information officer at UBS and founder of Bussmann Advisory, Oliver Bussmann, reckons there are only about 20,000 such individuals in existence. It’s difficult to find them. Your smart contract developer is most likely gainfully employed, rich or retired, or started his or her own company. Hiring such talent is woefully difficult and expensive. The demand is high and the supply low. In fact, Jimmy Song estimates that the lack of such qualified developers is the one thing that constricts today’s bitcoin ecosystem.

So how can you get lucky and find your smart contract developer?

Shidan Goran’s Advice

A rather pessimist article in Bitcoin Magazine discussed the looming shortage of qualified developers. William Mougayar, author of The Business Blockchain, reckoned there were about nine million Java developers and 18.5 million software developers worldwide. In contrast, he said, there are only “5,000 developers dedicated to writing software for cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and blockchain in general.” Steven Nerayoff, Founder and CEO of Maple Ventures, a Venture Capital firm primarily focused on emerging blockchain-based technologies and payment systems, dipped this number down to “about only a few hundred people that truly understand this blockchain development at a foundational level.” He added that there are more blockchain projects than people qualified to contribute.

The sole optimistic voice in that article was Shidan Gouran, an angel investor with several blockchain startups and innovative tech firms, as well as the organizer of the Blockchain Event, a North American conference series. Gouran says that companies needed to develop a viable and interesting idea or proposition to interest targeted smart contract engineers or developers. “More than anything,” he elaborated, “I think there is a shortage of good ideas. If a startup has a project that’s interesting and can really impact commerce and lives, then qualified people will sign on to start working on it.”

Another problem is that too many companies take the safe route and replicate projects presented by other ICOs and startups, rather than butting their heads against something new.

“I’ve often said that we need fewer white papers and more code,” said Gouran. “We need people who are starting projects and actually seeing them through rather than just doing crowd sales, raising money and kind of squandering it away, which we’re seeing a lot of nowadays. Ultimately that’s what I believe will attract top talent to this space.”

Applying Goran’s Advice

Shidan Gouran’s insights can help you in two ways:

Develop an outstanding idea

Your idea had better be unique. Great smart contract developers don’t like wasting their time, and tend to only go for ideas that help them change the world. Indeed, Nerayoff says that those firms working on what he calls “uninteresting projects” will find more of a shortage. “As an advisor to Ethereum,” he told Bitcoin Magazine, “I can personally tell you that people were fighting to get onboard there. They had no problems getting qualified programmers.” Nerayoff also mentioned other innovative blockchain companies. “In my opinion,” he said, “the best programmers always want to go to the most interesting projects, while others will continue to struggle to hire people.”

Your project should make sense and endure

The typical developer wants to use his or her time and use it well. He or she hates connections and rules, is wealthy enough to make one’s own future and not be subservient to you. The bad news is you may well end up subservient to him or her, as you recast your workplace culture, philosophy and standards to attract that developer.

Consider qualified remote smart contract software engineers

Nako Mbelle, Founder and CEO of the Toronto-based Fintech Recruiters, says that Python developer shortages are particularly acute, and that her firm has also been receiving requests for developers who know the hugely uncommon languages of Erlang, Golang, Python, Haskell and Scala, among others.

Mbelle recommends that “In order to attract talent, startups should be flexible about remote working options. We’re seeing a trend where startups want people in the office in order to build a corporate culture. However, the more experience a software developer has, the more likely they will want to work remotely, or have very flexible working environments.”

Bottom Line

Smart contract software engineers are mostly unconventional people who like nothing less than feeling they’re changing the world. They’re highly competitive, love the accolades of their peers, and are radical libertarians, so their philosophy is to decentralize everything from government to the money system and everything in between. Their goal is to give the people full control over their money and lives, and liberate them from government interference. Peacefully, of course. You want to hire a top smart contract developer? Consider these questions: Is your idea attractive? And why would they want to work for you?

We here at Blockchain Developers, Inc. are world-class at helping you find and hire the talented Blockchain developers you need to grow. Just fill out our contact form, and we’ll be happy to see if we can help!

Just before a volcano erupts, it often sends out tremors as warning signs. If the shockwaves of the recent Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are anything to go by, the overall blockchain industry is also set to explode imminently. Market data provider Research and Markets indicates that the blockchain market will jump to around $20 billion in 2025, eight times more than today’s figure of $2.5 billion. While conventional finance will fuel some of this growth, a large part of the increase is expected to come from enterprise applications produced by blockchain programmers. These enterprises will range from business contracts to supply chain operations, and more.

How Soon Will Your Enterprise Need Blockchain Talent?

Even if you’re not driving blockchain projects today, there is a good chance that your organization will be driving them sooner rather than later. Now that it is possible for distributed ledger engineers and smart contracts developers to improve such things as inter-company transactions, license creation, insurance records, rental agreements, and more, the opportunities are too tempting to ignore.

Overall, the three big advantages to enterprises of the blockchain are:

Cost savings. Intermediaries disappear. Overhead goes down, too.

Settlement time for payments goes down from days to almost no time at all.

Risk reduction. Records are protected against practically all possibilities of tampering.

With examples as diverse as retail giant Walmart using the blockchain to track meat imports from China, and popular singer Imogen Heap using the blockchain to protect the sales of her recordings, it becomes clear that the blockchain movement will impact industries across the board.

How Long Can You Sit on The Fence?

The answer is “not very long.” In today’s business environment, whether physical or digital, the enterprises that come out on top are the ones that are better at driving costs down while pushing customer satisfaction up. All others are doomed to become second stringers, get acquired, or go bankrupt. Competitive companies will seize the advantages of lower costs and faster operations that the blockchain offers. They will build teams of blockchain software engineers, not because they are in love with the technology, but because it helps them improve their business performance and bottom line. Consequently, customers, investors, and other stakeholders may soon start asking your enterprise what its plans are for blockchain, and how fast those plans will turn into reality.

What Skills Do You Need to Make Blockchain Work for You?

To make the most of all the possible advantages, your enterprise needs access to the corresponding skills and the people who possess them. A natural reflex is to look at what you already have. Companies often try to tally up the technical skillsets they have and compare them with the profile for a blockchain programmeror smart contracts developer. While it’s true that core software skills — supplemented as necessary by networking, security, and cryptography capabilities — are a necessary starting point, they are not likely to be sufficient for the job.

Have You Seen This Person in Your Organization?

Blockchain software engineers frequently have a certain aura around them. Some of this is due to the newness of the technology. Another part comes from the mindset that accompanies talented and knowledgeable blockchain developers. They have intellectual curiosity, a passion for open, decentralized systems, and confidence in finding solutions where none existed before. They are also typically at ease with multiple programming languages and large datasets, while having a good grasp of business transactions and economic principles. While some people may be able to check off most of these boxes, finding individuals who can tick all of them can be considerably more challenging.

What Are Your Options for Action?

To start realizing the advantages of blockchain today, should you try to train an internal team? Outsource your blockchain development to third-party startups? Hire bitcoin developers, distributed ledger engineers, and smart contracts developers of your own? Each option has its pros and cons, naturally. Training takes time, effort, and money (assuming you can even find trainers with the requisite experience and knowledge). Outsourcing may lead to a loss of control and prevent your enterprise from developing the core blockchain skills required for the future. Finding blockchain developers for hire can be a frustrating process, unless you know where to look for suitable candidates and how to approach them. If so, hiring full-time blockchain software engineers can offer an immediate solution with rapid time to productivity.

The Time to Hire a Blockchain Developer Is Now

The biggest institutions with the most to gain or lose from the advent of blockchain (financial intermediaries, for instance) have already started to hire bitcoin developers and build up their teams. Increased interest in blockchain developers for hire is also apparent in a variety of industry verticals. As the market expands, so will the overall pool of human resources, but from the bottom of the pyramid instead of from the top. If you hire a blockchain developer now, you won’t be stuck with the leftovers. Furthermore, with the right approach, effective, affordable hiring is possible for your enterprise today.

We here at Blockchain Developers, Inc. are world-class at helping you find and hire the talented Blockchain developers you need to grow. Just fill out our contact form, and we’ll be happy to see if we can help!

With the advent of Ethereum in 2015, a new industry is on the rise – the smart contract industry. Within this industry, participation and competition are more global than ever before, as crypto-currencies start bypassing the archaic financial systems of today at lighting speed. As each day goes by, we are drawing closer to the inevitable strategic inflection point that every successful business has to face when the fundamentals of an industry start to change.

A new 10X technological force has begun to create a new order of doing things. The old ways just don’t work anymore. Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, elaborates on this phenomena in his book, “Only The Paranoid Survive.” Intel had lost half a billion dollars in a few weeks as their customers, suppliers, manufacturers, and credit lenders started moving in a new direction. But Intel didn’t die; they faced it head-on and rose to a new level, moving their business from memory to microprocessors. As a result of this shift, they didn’t merely survive – they thrived. As existing industry leaders prepare for the next strategic inflection point, blockchain developers such as Ethereum developers could add value and help them adapt to the new way to doing things.

Ethereum is a global computation engine and a platform to build decentralized applications. Using smart contracts, an Ethereum developer can build globally decentralized applications. As of today the titles of Ethereum developer and smart contracts developer are being used interchangeably. Both refer to a developer who has an acute understanding of the Ethereum ecosystem and who can develop decentralized applications using the concept of smart contracts. Ethereum has a virtual machine known as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that compiles smart contracts written by various Ethereum developers and deploys them to the blockchain. These contracts (with the right permissions) can be accessed by any Ethereum engineer in the world from the Ethereum blockchain, and can be used to make even more complex applications.

A smart contract is a set of code that is written in an EVM-friendly language, such as Solidity or Serpent, and that lives permanently on the Ethereum blockchain. It has its own account address and can be initiated by users, blockchain developers, and other smart contracts that live in the network. Hence, it is able to understand and see the endless possibilities of decentralized applications that the future may hold.

Industry Use Case

Almost 90% of the projects that have gained attention recently have been built on the Ethereum blockchain. More than $2 billion capital was raised in ICOs by various crypto-ventures in 2017. With such a high number, it is easy to understand the rising demand for decentralized applications and Ethereum engineers.

Indorse (https://indorse.io/) is working on building a Linkedin alternative on the Ethereum blockchain. This would be a decentralized professional network running on its own cryptocurrency (IND) with a built-in identity system that enables skill verification. Users on the Indorse platform have full control of their own data and can monetize their activity with the help of IND. When users perform activities such as adding their profile data, endorsing the skills of other users, and so on, they are rewarded with IND. One drawback is that advertisers are required to pay in IND when they want to advertise on the Indorse platform.

Golem (https://golem.network/) is an ambitious project that aims to become a decentralized supercomputer that anyone can access. The network is powered with the help of personal laptops and data centers. High intensity computing needs, such as computer graphics rendering, DNA analysis, or cryptography mining pools can be addressed with the Golem network. Furthermore, users (individuals, as well as corporations) can rent out their unused computing power and earn the network’s internal cryptocurrency, or GNT.

Aragon (https://aragon.one) is another project that is building the bylaws for decentralized companies. As decentralized applications and organizations are a new way of doing things, a new method of governance is required. Through Aragon, decentralized applications have a simplified way to build cap tables, assign operational roles, raise funds, issue and transfer shares, or manage accounting and payroll. Like any other crypto network, it runs on its own internal currency, known as AN.

These are just a few examples of what an Ethereum developer or a blockchain engineer can help your company achieve. A new future of decentralized applications is being forged, and only a smart contract engineer can help your company get there. Hire an Ethereum developer today!

We here at Blockchain Developers, Inc. are world-class at helping you find and hire the talented Blockchain developers you need to grow. Just fill out our contact form, and we’ll be happy to see if we can help!

So, you want to hire outstanding blockchain developers? Unfortunately, while blockchain technology is on the rise, there are more blockchain projects than skilled blockchain software engineers, according to Steven Nerayoff, Founder and CEO of Maple Ventures, a venture capital firm. The problem worsens if you’re a startup working on an uninteresting project.

Blockchain is new. Its programming is different and far more complex than “simple” web programming. Blockchain developers rarely need the money. So, how do you recognize extraordinary developers from simply ordinary ones? And how do you motivate them to join your team?

Your Needs

Blockchain developers fall into three groups. Knowing what you want your developer to do helps you know which qualities to look for and how to motivate these individuals to join you:

Are you building applications that interact with your blockchain? You’ll want programmers who know web development and popular libraries like ReactJS. They don’t need specialized blockchain knowledge.

Are you building on an existing framework (usually in the form of smart contracts)? You need Solidity developers, with a background in programming, security and software testing. These developers should be familiar with IPFS/Filecoin, Oracles, token models, state channels, and the like.

Are you building a blockchain from scratch? You’ll want a full-stack developer with a strong background in lower-level programming languages (e.g., Java, OCaml, and C#), distributed systems and cryptography.

In short, the more complex and visible your project, the more skilled you’ll want your developer to be.

What To Look For

Ability to write high-quality code for Ethereum or Bitcoin blockchains

Experience in writing smart contracts and digital tokens

Familiarity with game theory and economic principles; both drive blockchain breakthroughs

Passionate about technology in general and FinTech technology in particular. While some have PhDs in the field, others are self-taught. What they have in common is decades-long experience in the field.

An excellent multi-tasker. Great developers solve technical and business problems simultaneously.

Unswervingly confident that they can resolve all problems. They’ll need to be to build a blockchain from scratch!

Here’s How You Motivate Terrific Blockchain Developers to Work for You

Blockchain developers of this third category are a unique bunch. Understanding them may help you charm them. Few of them are in it for the money. They are already millionaires from their blockchain investments. They love the work, and since most are crypto-anarchists (or radical libertarians who want to decentralize everything from government to corporations to the economy), they’re in it for changing the world. The best of the best are highly innovative, and some of them are likely running their own startups. If you want to attract these individuals, you’d better have something really good to offer them.

Know the book by the famous Behavioral Economist, Dan Ariely, Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations? The author’s insights apply here. Regular incentives lose. Appeal to higher ideals such as innovation, human progress, and so forth, and dangle a challenge. Show dream developers how their work will change the world and how they’ll gain visibility. Expect to hire remote devs who cherish independence and who juggle three or more projects simultaneously.

Prepare to spend top dollar. It’s worth it: Such blockchain software engineers will replace a gaggle of ordinary developers. And if your company’s psychology does not align with theirs, forget it – or zip down for lower-level talent.

For full-fledged blockchain developers who build your blockchain from scratch, you may want to model your keyword search and advertisements after the ads of IBM, Microsoft, USAA, and Visa, who recently scoured the web for blockchain software engineers.

Here’s what these mega corporations looked for:

Bottom Line

Depending on your needs, certain blockchain software engineers are relatively easy to find. It’s the third category that’s the hardest – particularly, if you’re seeking a great blockchain developer. It will help you to become an expert in the technology. You may also want to consider hiring a firm to develop your technology for short-term stop-gap measures. Alternatively, Zach Piester, co-founder of IntrepidVentures that helps blockchains startups, suggests you provide training for your high-performing developers to join the realm of truly remarkable blockchain developers.

At the very least, you’ll need to be unswervingly creative and flexible to win over some of the hardest-to-get talent in the world. Speak their lingo, walk their walk, know them better than they know themselves and craft your recruiting shtick accordingly. Consider it time well-spent.

We here at Blockchain Developers, Inc. are world-class at helping you find and hire the talented Blockchain developers you need to grow. Just fill out our contact form, and we’ll be happy to see if we can help!

Timing is the one element that visionary companies must get right. Many great products built by highly competent teams have failed – even in good markets – because they missed out on this key factor. Sometimes it is too early, and other times too late, but when things are just right, magic happens. Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Uber, and Airbnb are all examples of exceptional teams with top-notch products that entered the market at just the right time.

So how does one get this timing thing right? Unfortunately, there is no way to know for sure, but you can choose to be prepared. Like a surfer waiting for a wave, when the big one comes in and you are ready, you can reach spectacular heights.

Even as you read these words, there is a cryptocurrency wave approaching fast. Is a team of blockchain developers enough, or will you need an entire army of Ethereum developers, smart contracts developers, distributed ledger engineers, Bitcoin engineers and other blockchain software engineers?

In order to answer that question, we must accurately assess where we are with blockchain development as of 2017. As the industry paves its way to Web 3.0 from Web 2.0, infrastructural development is on the rise. New browsers, developer tools, Chrome plugins, wallets, and decentralized exchanges are among the most prominent products that the market is seeing today. Several promising decentralized applications and protocols have raised tremendous amounts of capital for venture capital firms, and for members of the general public, as well. As the infrastructure gets stronger, new applications pop up around the globe daily.

Some infrastructure development companies have already been working under the radar for the past few years, and will soon be able to satisfy much of the market demand. If your company wants to help build the infrastructure needed for this growing industry, then you need to get blockchain developers, blockchain software engineers, Ethereum developers, distributed ledger engineers, smart contracts coders, and smart contracts developers onto your team today. Now is the time to start creating the blockchain-based products that the future demands. There will never be a better time.

Industry Examples

As the race among protocols continues to develop the next cutting-edge infrastructure, a handful of products hold more promise than others.

Metamask (https://metamask.io/) is a chrome plug-in that bridges the gap between the decentralized Web 3.0 of tomorrow and the current Web 2.0 of today. Through Metamask, one can connect to the Ethereum main net and pay to use decentralized applications. The plug-in also has various test nets such as Ropsten and Kovan, which are used by Ethereum developers to deploy smart contracts to the blockchain.

Parity (https://parity.io/index.html), led by Ethereum’s co-founder Dr. Gavin Wood, is working on creating a fast Ethereum client that directly integrates with a browser in order to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. With Parity, a user can access the various decentralized applications within the Ethereum network, as well as the Ethereum’s cryptocurrencies. It has high performance and reliability with a small memory footprint.

Jaxx (https://jaxx.io/) is one of the leading wallet providers in the cryptocurrency industry. It allows users to store their various digital assets (such as Dash, Augur, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin) using keys that are created in the local device. This gives users full control of their privacy and their private keys. Jaxx is also a bold participant in the crypto open-source movement and its source code is available on their website.

Soon, Web 3.0 will affect our lives in the same way Web 2.0 did, and the companies that lead the industry will be able to create and capture value like never before. It’s not too late – hire a smart contracts engineer today!

We here at Blockchain Developers, Inc. are world-class at helping you find and hire the talented Blockchain developers you need to grow. Just fill out our contact form, and we’ll be happy to see if we can help!

What can Ethereum offer the business world that otherwise leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin cannot? A complete platform for development of blockchain applications like smart contracts, product traceability, license management, and insurance records, that’s what. The bitcoin “Swiss Army knife” approach of building fundamentally different software for each need makes those programs harder to develop and more expensive to maintain.

Ethereum offers a robust, standardized base on which Ethereum developers can streamline app development. That’s also one of the reasons that Ether, Ethereum’s own cryptocurrency, has recently risen in value by 500% to become the real competitor to Bitcoin, which rose by just 50% during the same period .

What is Driving Ethereum Development?

Essentially, cost savings, faster transactions, and lower risk drive Ethereum development. These are the things that enterprises just can’t get enough of. Part of this is due to blockchain technology in general, which allows organizations to transact with each other without intermediaries like banks and clearing houses.

The technology also protects information and records, making it practically impossible to falsify them. Add in the speed of transactions with Ether, which happen within minutes instead of the days needed for traditional methods, and the advantages become even clearer. Current real-world examples of Ethereum applications include digital fingerprints for diamonds, precious metal investments, and even marriage contracts.

When Will Your Enterprise Start Using Ethereum?

“Sooner than you think” could be the answer. Your customers, suppliers, and business partners may all start pushing for payments in Ether or contract management using blockchain apps developed on the Ethereum platform. At the rate at which blockchain is spreading, their Ethereum engineers could be calling up your IT department tomorrow, asking to speak to your distributed ledger coders or smart contracts developers.

Naturally, this kind of capability can also become a factor in deciding where they will spend their money or with whom they will choose to do business. But more than that, your enterprise should be getting the benefits of lower costs, quicker operations, and reduced risk anyway, all of which are part of the Ethereum promise.

Which Skillsets Does Ethereum Require?

It might be more accurate to ask, “Which skillsets and mindsets does an Ethereum engineer need?” The decentralized applications or dapps that blockchain enables are not just a technical innovation. They also represent a new way of looking at enterprise operations, markets, and economies.

Good programming skills, supplemented by knowledge of cryptography and networking, are only the start. Intellectual curiosity and confidence in being able to solve problems by offering diverse solutions are also part of the makeup of the capable, successful Ethereum developer.

How Much Ethereum Capability Do You Have Today?

The first place to look for skills and attitudes of smart contracts developers or distributed ledger coders is naturally within your enterprise. You may find you have some employees who can check some of the boxes. You may also find you have few or no employees who can check all the boxes. This is only to be expected.

After all, Ethereum, despite its rapid adoption, is still a relatively new concept that has been developed and deployed largely by independent experts. These innovators also have a passion for changing the old closed world order and replacing it with a new, open yet secure, system available to individuals and enterprises without restriction.

How Can You Move Forward?

If you don’t have Ethereum capability in-house today, you’ll need some other way to access Ethereum developer skills. Your first option is to try to put together an Ethereum team internally. For this, you’ll need to carefully pick and pool the necessary skills. You’ll also need to give the pool professional training provided by people with high Ethereum knowledge and experience. Creating the right Ethereum attitude will be an additional challenge.

Your second option is to use a third-party company and outsource your development. This could reduce lead time, but could also increase risk of confidential information being leaked. It also runs the risk of abrupt termination of an agreement, leaving your enterprise without the skills or resources to continue.

Your third option is to hire full-time Ethereum developers that can rapidly become productive and help you develop valuable in-house expertise – if you happen to know where to find these people and how to convince them to work for your enterprise.

The Time to Hire Ethereum Developers is Now

Other enterprises have already started their Ethereum engineer recruiting activities, in finance, healthcare, supply chain, and many of the other sectors where Ether, Ethereum or blockchain technology can be used. With the business opportunities already available, as well as competition to hire the best Ethereum engineers heating up, now is the time to recruit these people to build up your own in-house resources.

Fortunately, not only is hiring full-time Ethereum developers the way to rapid and sustainable results, but it can also be efficient and affordable when you choose the right recruitment solution to help your enterprise to meet its needs.

Is this scale still accurate?

We here at Blockchain Developers, Inc. are world-class at helping you find and hire the talented Blockchain developers you need to grow. Just fill out our contact form, and we’ll be happy to see if we can help!